Sun, 13 May 2007

After JavaOne . . .

I made it home, none the worse for wear. The train ride was relaxing -- I really appreciated not having to drive the 80 miles from San Francisco to Sacramento. I have not returned to work since the conference, but I do have a couple of thoughts. Whenever I go to one of these things, I wonder if it's really all that beneficial for someone like me. I don't own a company or produce a product that I'm trying to sell to someone, so contacts aren't all that great. As previous years, I learned some things and found other things less than useful. It's difficult when you have to select sessions before attending the conference, to judge what will be useful and what will not.

It didn't seem like there were all that many new and wonderful things this year. The theme was open source and the major announcement was Sun's completion of the open sourcing of Java. OK, that's sort of a big deal, but doesn't really affect me all that much. I did download NetBeans 6.0 preview onto my Macintosh, but as you might expect for my first weekend back, I haven't had much time to play with it. I don't imagine I will get all that much time for a few weeks.

I was most impressed by a scripting language -- Ruby -- running on the JVM (JRuby). I have been working with the language in my spare time (little of that!) and was facinated by its ease of use and ability (with the Rails packages) to produce web applications in a hurry. The ability of the NetBeans IDE to work with Ruby is one of the main reasons I downloaded it. I'm really interested in getting to know this environment and see if it will work for the small, fast development that I am sometimes called upon to do at work.

Admittedly, I'm a bit leary of brining another language into our primarily Java shop, but JRuby has some promise to give the integration with our Java environment and libraries with the speed and ease of development of the Rails environment. Anyway, I'll take a look at it.

I also got some time to spend with potential vendors. We are looking at Liferay portal as a possiblity for our intranet and I got some time to speak with them at the conference. It seems like a likely candidate to replace our existing technology and provide some additional collaborative features.

All-in-all, I'd say this year's JavaOne was worth the time and effort I put into it and the cost to the company. Next year . . . well . . . we'll see . . .

posted 12:57 [/Technology] permanent link